Another woman on Fortune‘s Greatest Leaders list, Save the Children CEO Carolyn Miles, shared her formula for success: “Don’t worry too much about where you’re going. Pay attention to where you are.”

That was just some of the wisdom imparted last week at Fortune‘s 2015 “Most Powerful Women Evening with…” dinner in New York City. The invitation-only gathering included other well-known guests such as Martha Stewart and Katie Couric, who laughed as Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers grilled Mayer on how she measures her return on investment in Couric, who last year joined Yahoo at an annual salary reportedly exceeding $5 million.

Also, the evening featured 19 rising-star leaders from across the world who came to the U.S. in April as part of this year’s Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership. Each year since 2006, this month-long program has paired emerging international women leaders with Fortune MPW Summit participants, who host them at their companies for two weeks.

Here’s the full transcript of Pattie Sellers’ on-stage interview with Mayer.

And here’s a look at the powerful forces that came together for the Fortune MPW evening…

A service to help you build your own personal board of directors

Seated side by side at a conference room table at the Fortune office, Yahoo YHOO chairman Maynard Webb and former Cisco executive Mike Bergelson prepare to tell me the story of how they met. The former, with a bare scalp and gruff voice, gives off an air of sagacity and eminence; the latter is eager, upright, and energetic. Their speech exudes rehearsed spontaneity—it’s clear they’ve recounted this tale before. As they do, they sometimes complete each other’s thoughts.

In 2008 Webb, then chief executive at LiveOps, a virtual call center company, was looking for a new head of product management. One of his customers recommended Bergelson. “He told me he was the best, most insightful person, in the product space we were in, in the world,” Webb says. Bergelson lights up at the compliment: “I had no idea from whence it came, but I was happy to have heard that!”

Giddily, they resume. “So I reached out and tried to recruit him, and he gave me the Heisman,” Webb says, assuming the inflection of a rebuffed lover. “But I really liked him,” he adds, channeling that asked-her-out-everyday-until-she-said-yes kind of cadence. Despite the initial rejection, the men kept in touch.

Later, and fresh off completing his book Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship, Webb found himself preoccupied with managerial concerns. He had an idea: “There really isn’t a way to get people great coaching,” Webb says. “It’s very cool we have this entrepreneurial culture, but sometimes when you move forward you leave something behind.” That thing, according to Webb? Workplace mentorship.

Bergelson, motivated by a botched mentorship experience of his own, signed on to the effort. While at Cisco CSCO, Bergelson had been matched by the company’s human resources department with Mike Volpi, a meteoric leader whom many insiders believed would succeed CEO John Chambers. But Volpi soon left Cisco for the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Bergelson was never reassigned a mentor. “All those battles I fought, those political battles that I fought and mostly lost while I was at Cisco,” Bergelson laments, “if I had had somebody to talk to I would have avoided most of those.”

Determined to prevent others from suffering a similar fate, Bergelson and Webb last year founded Everwise, a company that connects apprentices with advisors—or protégés and mentors, in the company’s parlance. Think of the service as a platonic OKCupid for the office.

It works like this: Where popular dating apps like Tinder pull Facebook FB data to assemble their members’ profiles, Everwise draws data from LinkedIn LNKD pages. In addition to offering a mobile application through which to assess its users’ interests, Everwise will also arrange a half-hour pre-screening call for each party with a concierge-like career coach. An algorithm then helps pair participants. Afterward, the liaisons—many of whom happen to be stay-at-home mothers, Bergelson notes—keep tabs, collect feedback, and nudge participants (when necessary) over a 6-month mentorship cycle.

It’s not exactly like online dating. Instead of an automated prompt urging its users to chat—e.g. “You both like things. Talk about them”—Everwise’s human intermediaries facilitate the relationship, an aspect that many clients cite as crucial to its success. This interpersonal touch helps Everwise avoid some of the pitfalls that occasionally accompany online dating: Supply and demand mismatch, a suitor’s sudden unresponsiveness, uncertainty where one stands with a recent connection. Through technology and a dollop of human intervention, Everwise aims to eliminate whatever one might term the professional equivalent of unrequited love.

Much as especially attractive people on dating apps receive the bulk of attention, so do mentors at glamorous companies who bear distinguished, exciting titles. Why lunch with Joe Dull in accounting, an up-and-coming professional mentee may ask, when you can dine with someone like Larry Page? Everwise aims to help people make meaningful connections that both parties will benefit from, rather than letting infatuation with star power run amok.

That’s not to say there aren’t hiccups. When Allison Kelly, COO at Pacific Community Ventures, a small business lending and advising nonprofit, heard about Everwise, she excitedly signed up in summer 2012. It took until fall for Everwise to find a match. “Everwise was very apologetic,” she says, noting that the company had some difficulty selecting someone who fit her stature. Eventually, she was paired with Laura Mather, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who is CEO and founder of Unitive.works, an organization that promotes diversity and equality in the workplace. “Laura was well worth the wait,” Kelly says.

Mather was equally as effusive. “To be honest, it was amazing,” she says. “From the first time we talked, I felt we really clicked.” During a particular rough patch, Mather called Kelly nearly every night for two weeks. Kelly’s supervisor had gone to Europe, and she was facing several stressful situations at work. Mather helped quell her protégé’s anxieties, taught her meditation techniques, and helped her kick an unrelenting bout of insomnia. Even after graduating the program, the two still speak regularly. Kelly has since become a mentor herself. “Heck, if online dating sites could do this well, there would be lot more happy marriages out there and a lot fewer single people,” Mather says.

Participants at other companies have also reported positive results. Mark Eisner, senior group medical director at Genentech DNA, recently ran an Everwise pilot program with 40 employees. “It went really well,” he says. “It exceeded my expectations.” Even in the two cases where pairings did not pan out, Eisner says Everwise quickly remedied the situation. “I don’t think you would expect to see so many successful matches if it weren’t for the algorithm,” he says, adding that as a scientist, the data-driven aspect appeals to him.

Susan Lovegren, senior vice president of human resources at Plantronics PLT, an audio equipment company, says that she has used Everwise as a way to re-inspire disengaged employees. The program provides a way for the company to show that it cares about and wants to invest in its people, she says. Lovegren conducted a 20-person pilot in 2013 and has since renewed for a second cohort of 50 people.

At the end of 2013 Everwise partnered with Virgin Unite, the charitable nonprofit arm of billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, to launch a co-developed online platform to help train and guide entrepreneurs around the world. Virgin Unite now has about 1,500 mentors on the platform and 500 entrepreneurs—an ideal 3-to-1 ratio, says Benjamin Hay, Virgin Unite’s head of strategic projects. “We want to make sure we’re successful, and doing that at scale is really quite difficult,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to achieve success without the technology that Everwise provided.”

Sure, the story of how Everwise’s founders met is more serendipitous and organic than the algorithm-fueled matches their startup now engineers. But Bergelson remains adamant that matchmaking requires no magic. “Our vision is to help people build these personal boards of directors, but to do it in a way that scales using software,” Bergelson says. “This is what people did with the online dating industry 25 or 20 years ago. People were like, ‘That’s crazy going to go meet somebody down at the bar—you need to make sure there’s chemistry and all that.’ We now know that’s not true.”

Bergelson cites data to emphasize his point. Where there was once a stigma around digital dating, now 1-in-4 married couples in the U.S. have met online, he says. (Actually, a 2013 study commissioned by the dating site eHarmony found that relationships between more than a third of couples that married between 2005-2013 began online. On the other hand, a Pew Research Center study from the same year found that only 1-in-20 married or committed couples in the U.S. say they met online, though eight times as many American singles report having used online dating sites or apps. Those figures, of course, have probably risen since.) But Everwise’s own success rate speaks for itself. The overwhelming majority of people who mentor through Everwise—upwards of 94%—say, at the end of the mentorship cycle, that they would like to reapply for another protégé, according to Bergelson.

Chemistry? Alchemy? It turns out that neither are necessary to make a match. Just an algorithm for a professional life lived happily Everwise after.

Update, May 11, 2015: This article has been updated to include the results of a 2013 online dating study that appeared in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Being a mom or dad sharpens your work skills

Maybe reading Goodnight Moon to your toddler for the 59th time in one evening isn’t your idea of a thrill, but cheer up. It could be making you more marketable. About 67% of 2,138 employers in a new CareerBuilder poll named “patience” as the No. 1 trait that makes parents attractive as job candidates.

In all, says the survey, “69% of employers believe the skills acquired by being a parent can qualify as relevant experience in the corporate world.” Here are the other qualities they mentioned:

Ability to multi-task: 62%

Time management: 59%

Conflict management: 51%

Problem-solving: 51%

Empathy: 43%

Mentoring: 40%

Negotiation: 37%

Budgeting/managing finances: 36%

Project management: 30%

At the same time, it seems that the 1,004 working parents CareerBuilder polled tend to underestimate the value of what they do at home, or discount it completely. The survey, timed to coincide with the approach of Mother’s Day, found that only 8% of working moms — and zero dads — say they have ever mentioned their parenting skills in a resume or cover letter.

How Abbott Labs is crushing it in Asia

Amid the stampede of Western multinationals pushing to expand in China and India, a few are way out ahead of the pack. Take Abbott Laboratories (No. 136 on the Fortune 500), for instance. The Illinois-based maker of nutritional products and medical devices (2014 sales: $20.2 billion) now gets about a third of its worldwide revenues from Asia.

Granted, Abbott had a head start. The company has operated in India since 1910, and it opened its first Chinese subsidiary in the 1930s. Still, most of its growth is built on far more recent investments, totaling about $5 billion since 2009. That figure includes manufacturing plants in Singapore and Jiaxing, and a string of acquisitions that have turned Abbott into India’s biggest pharmaceutical maker.

To keep up with all that expansion, Abbott has doubled its hiring in Asia in the past six years. The company now has 26,000 Chinese and Indian employees, and it plans to add 4,000 more this year, including about 500 new grads recruited from 108 campuses across India.

And that’s where things get really interesting. As any Western manager who’s helped run an Asian business unit can attest, one of the big challenges is that workers tend not to stick around long. About 40% of Chinese employees stay in one job for less than two years, according to a Hay Group study. In India, annual turnover of 50% or more is not unusual.

That’s clearly a problem, not only because constantly recruiting and training people over and over again is expensive, but because it’s disruptive. Continuity, let alone growth, can be tough to maintain when half your team is made up of brand-new faces every few months.

So it’s a real competitive advantage that Abbott’s turnover in China is under 20%, or about half the average for the country. In India, it’s even lower, at about 15%.

How do they entice employees to stay? Senior managers at the company say Abbott’s approach is threefold:

Put local managers in charge. “If you can’t develop in-market expertise, you won’t get the top talent,” says Stephen Fussell, Abbott’s executive vice president of HR. “Sending Americans to run operations sends a signal, unintentional or not, that locals can’t get promoted to management jobs. So the best people leave.”

To prevent that, Abbott sends American managers to Asia, not as expat bosses, but as consultants on short assignments “with a definite end date,” says Roger Bird, who just returned stateside after six years overseeing Abbott’s nutrition business in China. Americans “are there to help adapt U.S. practices to the local market, but the Chinese managers know they still make all the decisions.”

Abbott also offers the same career-development opportunities to Chinese and Indian managers that American up-and-comers get, including coaching, training, special projects, and frequent contact with top executives. “We want to make sure high-potential leaders know we’re investing in them for the long term,” says Caroline Ceisel, director of employee and leadership development. “It keeps our retention rates high.”

Tailor management training to each culture. This might sound obvious, except that many multinational companies don’t do it, or do it only partway. Abbott uses case studies in its U.S. management training but, instead of exporting the same cases to Asia, “we explained what competencies we needed to develop and what success would look like,” says Ceisel. “Then we let the local leaders in Asia develop the training, including cases specific to their own markets and their own customers.”

Most U.S. employers do all or most of their Asian management training in English, but not Abbott. In China, training is conducted in Mandarin. “Lots of people in China and India speak some English, or they want to learn it, and that’s great,” notes Roger Bird. “But we want people to be able to focus on the content, and not have to struggle with the language at the same time.”

Teach senior managers how to be mentors. Younger managers in China are even more in need of mentoring than in the U.S., Bird points out, since “they haven’t grown up with parents or others they can ask for advice or see as role models. They’re usually the only person they know who works for a big Western company.”

On his watch, Bird encouraged both formal and informal mentoring programs. “In Chinese culture, people tend to be very deferential to authority, so you worry that younger, more junior people will not speak up,” he says. “It’s important to show them that we want to hear their ideas.” Along with four mentees in the formal program, Bird most recently coached “8 or 10 people informally, who knew my door was always open and they could always come talk to me.”

One purpose of having a mentor in any country, of course, is to help people figure out their next career move, and their long-term goals. In China, “everyone is surprised, at first, that senior managers take an interest in their career aspirations,” Bird says. “We’ve had to teach Chinese managers to do that kind of coaching and development work with their subordinates, because it’s very unfamiliar to them.”

It’s also a major reason why Abbott’s turnover is so low. Once people get a taste of having their own individual voice heard and respected, they tend to want to stay for more.

When acting like a boss makes you feel like a fraud

Dear Annie: I have a really weird problem. About two months ago, my boss abruptly quit to take a job at another company, and I got promoted literally overnight into his role as leader of my 28-person team. This is great, of course, except for one thing: I’ve never managed anyone before and I don’t feel ready.

Every time I act like I’m in charge — for example, running a team meeting or telling someone they have to meet a deadline — I feel like I’m just pretending to be the boss, and everyone can see through my act. I’ve signed up for what little management training my company offers, but is there anything else I can do in the meantime? Should I just “fake it till I make it”? — Philadelphia Phony

Dear Philadelphia: Your problem isn’t weird. Being thrust into a management role without any time to prepare would be a challenge for anyone.

It’s also more common than it used to be. “Not only have many employers cut back on formal management training, but there is less informal training now,” observes Herminia Ibarra, who teaches leadership and organizational behavior at INSEAD in Paris and wrote a new book, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. “Until recently, people on their way up learned from other managers, who had time to mentor them and clue them in on some of the subtleties of the job. It was almost like an apprenticeship.”

These days, with fewer and busier bosses, and many employees working in remote locations, “a lot of the informal mentoring that used to ease the way to a promotion just isn’t happening,” she adds. “Now, you’re far more likely to have to figure things out for yourself, which is much harder, and much more likely to make you feel like a fake.”

Ibarra suggests you think of the adjustment to management “not as faking it till you make it, but faking it until you learn it.” It might help to keep in mind that a big chunk of the discomfort you feel as a new boss is simply normal growing pains. Stepping into a bigger role “is always a stretch. You’re always in over your head at first, because nothing in your experience is similar to this,” she says. “Authenticity as a leader is an outcome, not a starting point, and your true self as a manager isn’t going to be the same as your old self.”

So how do you get from here to there? “Asking advice from peers may not get you very far, because people tend to tell you things like, ‘Just be more confident,’ which doesn’t help,” Ibarra notes. You could also try emulating a favorite boss, adapting his or her style to your current job. But “you have a different personality, a different team, and different circumstances. So that may not work either.”

The most successful leaders Ibarra has studied have grown comfortable with bigger roles by emulating more experienced leaders in their own organizations. “Pay close attention to particular things others do well — how they run a meeting, how they project competence, how they give feedback,” Ibarra says. If possible, recreate the old mentoring approach by getting to know higher-ups better. “Ask them who influenced them, and how they think about what they do,” she suggests.

The point isn’t to imitate anyone, which could make you feel like even more of a phony, but to gather ideas that might be helpful in refining your own style. Act Like a Leader quotes martial arts guru Bruce Lee, who counseled anyone learning a new skill to “use only that which works, and take it from anywhere you can find it.”

The main thing that will make you feel like less of a fraud: Time. “There really is no such thing as a ‘born leader,’ and no one correct way” to become accustomed to leading, Ibarra says. “You have to try things and experiment with different approaches until you find you’ve grown into it.” At only two months in your current job, you’re just getting started. Says Ibarra, “It takes time, so be generous and a bit forgiving of yourself.”

Talkback: If you’ve ever felt you were “faking it” in a new job, how did you get over that? Leave a comment below.

When mentors cross the line

The New York Times Magazinerecently profiled the troubling, potentially criminal relationship between a former Stanford student, Ellie Clougherty, and entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale who was, among other things, Clougherty’s mentor for the undergraduate course Engineering 145: Technology Entrepreneurship.

As the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly disturbing. Lonsdale and Clougherty’s relationship evolves from that of a mentor and mentee into a romantic relationship and then, Clougherty alleges, into something much more disturbing—including sexual harassment and assault. Clougherty took the case to Stanford officials and Lonsdale was banned from the Stanford campus for ten years (though that ban seems theoretical at best, given that, according to Bazelon, “Lonsdale has been invited to campus for a private lunch which he attended with the university’s permission.”). Clougherty filed a civil suit in January and Lonsdale has responded, vigorously, and filed a countersuit, denying Clougherty’s accusations.

Clougherty graduated from Stanford in 2013 and is looking to build a career that involves brain research, tech and social activism.

It’s a murky situation—but a mentoring relationship went horribly wrong. Clearly both professional and personal boundaries were crossed inappropriately—and a young woman who was supposed to be mentored and encouraged professionally was, instead, embroiled in what was, at best, an unhealthy relationship with someone who possessed undue influence.

There is ample evidence that mentoring for college students can have a significant impact on how prepared recent graduates feel as they enter the workplace. A 2014 Gallup study of 30,000 college students found that mentoring opportunities were remarkably important to long term career success and satisfaction. Brandon Busteed, the executive director of Gallup Education noted how the study revealed that, “the three most potent elements linked to long-term success for college grads relate to emotional support: feeling that they had a professor who made them excited about learning, that the professors at their alma mater cared about them as a person, and that they had a mentor who encouraged them to pursue their goals and dreams.”

Lonsdale never treated Clougherty as someone who had goals and dreams. Instead, Lonsdale, by engaging in a personal relationship with his young mentee, treated her as a romantic conquest. He ignored his professional responsibility for personal gain. Lonsdale insists that, “Ellie is a forceful person,” as if, somehow, that negates the inherent power imbalance not only in a mentor/mentee relationship, but also between a 21-year old college student and a hugely successful 29-year old entrepreneur.

It should go without saying, but mentors cannot treat the mentor/mentee relationship as a garden of earthly delights. They have one primary responsibility in such a relationship—to provide support and guidance for young men and women. Mentees are not potential romantic interests or sexual conquests. They are not potential acolytes or personal assistants. The mentor/mentee relationship is a professional one and should be treated as such. If there is a temptation to cross lines, resist. There is a responsibility attached to being a mentor. Mentors must live up to that responsibility. It really is that simple.

Alumni are a natural source of mentoring for colleges and universities. These alumni and their success stories are living proof that the education at any given college or university works, and that the current students are making a wise, invaluable investment in their future. Joe Lonsdale is one of countless alumni who have been tapped by their alma maters to work with promising undergraduates. Unfortunately, though, many universities seem to think that getting mentors on campus is all they need to do. There is, all too often, little oversight and few systems in place to help students when these relationships become troubled.

Universities and colleges can’t merely provide mentoring opportunities for their students. They need to monitor those relationships to ensure they are functioning productively and mutually for both the mentor and the mentee. There needs to be a system of checks and balances, if you will. Had the professor of the course who originally assigned Lonsdale to mentor Ellie Clougherty engaged in even the most basic of oversight, a great deal of suffering might have been averted. We cannot undo what has been done but universities and colleges can work to ensure that such a problematic mentoring relationship never happens again.

Roxane Gay is an English professor at Purdue University and a New York Times best-selling author. She’s written Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and the forthcomingHunger. She is also editor of The Butter. Roxane’s column for Fortune, “Beyond the Workplace,” will delve into why corporate America should care about the social issues happening outside of the office. Follow her at @rgay.

Why ‘knowing it all’ won’t help you at work

MPW Insider is one of several online communities where the biggest names in business answer timely career and leadership questions. Today’s answer for: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time? is written by Adena Friedman, President of Nasdaq.

Many women try to advance in their careers by having all the answers; by being the go-to person for information and advice; or by building expertise in a particular field. However, as they progress, gain broader responsibilities, and grow into leadership roles, they realize that their span of control is too vast to be able to know every answer. It is no longer possible to be the go-to person in every situation, and suddenly, they have to be the one who is asking the questions rather than answering them.

So what is one skill that all aspiring leaders should develop? The power to listen. Listen to clients, employees, and peers and stay open to their ideas, feedback, and answers. Doing so is vital to the success of any leader. A leader who listens is one who is malleable and willing to refine her views and actions as she learns new information or hears a better idea.

Listening is also a powerful mentoring tool; being listened to is both fulfilling and motivational. Empowering those around you to be heard and valued makes the difference between a leader who simply instructs and one who inspires. Leading the organization based on what you learn from those you value is what I have found to be both among the more difficult and rewarding parts of becoming a leader.

Read all answers to the MPW Insider question: What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?

This woman inspired a generation of female winemakers

This post is in partnership with Food & Wine for its #FoodWineWomen series, which spotlights top women in food and drink in collaboration with Toklas Society. The article below was originally published at FoodandWine.com.

Who: Professor Ann Noble

What: She taught enology at the University of California for nearly 30 years. Many of her pupils are now among the best winemakers in the US.

Over 28 years at the University of California, Davis, professor Ann Noble taught the science of flavor and aroma to thousands of enology students. Many of her pupils are now among the best winemakers in the US. “She was a force of nature, a take-no-prisoners professor and a don’t-waste-my-time lecturer,” says Celia Welch, winemaker for Napa’s Scarecrow and her own Corra label. “Anyone who thought a university course in wine tasting would be a cakewalk clearly hadn’t met Dr. Noble.”

“I remember one morning at UC Davis, while preparing for class with my co–teaching assistant Robbie Meyer, we noticed a beautiful floral aroma filling the hallway,” recalls winemaker Sally Johnson-Blum of Napa’s Pride Mountain Vineyards. “He and I got into a serious argument about whether it was geraniol or beta-Damascenone—I was for the latter, and I still think I was right. Ann inspired that kind of passion. It wasn’t just about pleasant aromas, either. Once, I walked into Ann’s lab to find a grad student with her nose buried in a sweaty leather boot.”

Celia Welch: Student in Noble’s wine sensory analysis class in 1982.Her Wine: 2012 Corra Cabernet Sauvignon ($150). Welch makes only a few hundred cases of her superlative Napa Cabernet, but it’s findable if you hunt, and well worth the search.

Use the hashtag #FoodWineWomen on Twitter (@foodandwine) to share lessons from your (real and dream) mentors for the chance to be featured in Food & Wine’s #FoodWineWomen series.

Why young workers avoid mentors

Dear Annie: Knowing from my own experience how valuable it can be to have a mentor (or more than one) in your corner, I volunteered to start a program here that would match high-potential women with more senior people who could coach them.

My company has done a great job recruiting talented young women, and I’ve identified a couple dozen of my fellow managers (most, but not all, female) who are enthusiastic about acting as mentors. The trouble is, in the six months or so since we launched the program, only a handful of mentees have signed on. I’ve tried asking some of the younger women who aren’t in the program why they don’t take advantage of it, but haven’t gotten answers that make sense to me. Do you have any suggestions on how to “sell” this idea to reluctant mentees? Or should I just be patient and let word of mouth do the talking? — Just Joanne

Dear J.J.: There’s no question that, if you asked any of Fortune’sMost Powerful Women—and any powerful man—how they scaled the corporate heights, she or he would give a nod to at least one mentor who helped along the way, and usually several. What’s more, it seems almost everybody knows that. About 82% of men and women in a recent Opinion Research Corp. poll said that having a structured mentorship program would make a company a more attractive place to work.

Yet you’re not the only one seeing a big, and surprising, disconnect: The same survey found that, among people whose employers made mentoring available, only 21% of men who were eligible for it participated in the program—and just 18% of women.

Why so few? The main reason is a subtle stigma that most managers might never think of. “We’ve heard many women say they tend to see asking for a mentor as a sign of weakness,” says Elizabeth Schehl, who leads a program called WINGS (Women’s Initiative for New Growth Strategies) at financial firm Edward Jones, No. 4 on Fortune’s list of best companies to work for. “They really fear that, if they raise their hands for additional support, other people will perceive them as unable to succeed on their own.”

Overcoming that reluctance to seem needy takes time and, as you note, positive word of mouth from people who do participate will probably help. In the meantime, Schehl offers these suggestions for speeding up the process:

Enlist fellow managers to create awareness. “Sometimes at the outset, people don’t know that a program exists, or they have only a vague idea of what it’s for,” says Schehl. “So you have to do some internal marketing.” She enlisted a team of senior managers, especially women, to talk up WINGS at regional sales meetings and informal networking events. “Once we made it clear to more employees what mentoring is about—with emphasis on the idea that it does not mean ‘I need extra help to do my job’—enrollment grew fast.”

Make the first move. While you’re spreading the word, instead of waiting for employees to sign themselves up, go ahead and assign a mentor to each young up-and-comer. At Edward Jones, mentors get some training on how to coach mentees, including the message that “it is imperative to your success to ask for guidance now and then,” says Schehl.

Build in flexibility. First-year hires at Edward Jones are automatically enrolled in a year-long program called Early Success, where mentors and mentees meet a minimum of six to eight times over 12 months, for 30- to 60-minute sessions. “This way, everyone knows in advance how many meetings are expected,” Schehl says. “But once people have ‘graduated’ from that first year, it’s more flexible.” Mentees can either stick with the same mentor, move to a different one, or add some new advisors, depending on what skills they need to work on.

Get senior management involved. This can go a long way toward convincing people that seeking advice is not a sign of incompetence: Encourage senior managers to talk about the role of mentors in their own careers, right up to the present. Edward Jones holds frequent get-togethers where “million-dollar producers sit next to new trainees who haven’t got their [securities] licenses yet,” Schehl says. “The senior people have mentors too, usually because they want to develop their leadership skills or polish other aspects of their performance, so we encourage them to talk about that.”

So far, Edward Jones’ mentoring efforts, started in 2009, seem to be paying off. Schehl says women make up 18% of the firm’s 13,000 financial advisors, a notch above the 16% for the securities industry overall. Here’s hoping that what’s working there will work for your program, too.

Talkback: If your employer has a formal mentoring program, have you taken advantage of it? Why or why not? Leave a comment below.

The extraordinary, depressing power of failing upwards

FORTUNE — Dear Annie: Can I just vent some frustration here? A few days ago, yet again, someone I used to work with got promoted over my head and is now running the whole department. This has happened before, both here and where I worked before, so I should be used to it by now. But, without sounding too whiny, I have to say it seems especially unfair this time. I’ve been here seven years, have never missed a project deadline even when meeting it meant working nights, weekends, and once even when I was in the hospital for minor surgery.

Our new boss, by contrast, just got here last year and is considered a star despite being, to put it politely, not nearly so dependable. Do senior managers making decisions about promotions really value flash over substance? Or am I just a chump for believing that hard work should be rewarded? — Steamed in San Francisco

Dear Steamed: The notion that hard work leads to success is so ingrained in the popular imagination that believing it doesn’t make anyone a chump. Unfortunately, though, organizations (like people) rarely conform to the ideal, which is why they often demand one kind of behavior but reward some other kind, which can certainly be confusing.

Brendan Reid, now a senior executive at a technology company he’d rather not name, noticed this so often over his 20-year corporate career that he wrote a book about it. Stealing the Corner Office: The Winning Career Strategies They’ll Never Teach You in Business School starts with dispelling with what Reid calls “the myth of meritocracy.”

That’s less cynical than it sounds. Reid spent lots of time earlier in his career “being manager of this and manager of that,” he says. Then he started analyzing what less dedicated, less competent peers were doing to break out of the middle-management pack. As you’ve noticed, intelligence is no guarantee of moving up, he writes. Most companies are full of “smart but stationary” people.

The reason, he says, is that the most diligent, hardworking employees rarely take on big enough challenges to get noticed. “Being steady and dependable is defined by a series of small wins. And small wins score small points,” he says. “So go after big projects, where you can score big wins.” That way, he adds, your reputation can even handle mistakes “when they inevitably happen. Higher-ups remember people who did big things. Reliability is fine, but it just doesn’t stick in anyone’s mind.”

Okay, but the career strategy laid out in Stealing the Corner Office doesn’t stop there. Reid believes most of the buzzwords currently in vogue in corporate America are misleading or downright worthless. Take, for instance, the notion that getting ahead takes passion. “Passion is the most overused word in business,” he says. “I used to be extremely passionate about my ideas, until the day I realized I was coming across as a jerk.”

Reid says he started moving up through the executive ranks only after “I became known for calmly presenting several options, in any situation, instead of passionately insisting my way was right.” People get promoted, he says, in large part because other people — especially, but not only, bosses — like working with them, and passion too often puts colleagues off. “Your best ideas will probably be adopted anyway, without your having to pound the table,” he notes. “It’s much more useful to forget about passion, and come across as unemotional and impartial.”

Or take the familiar phrase “results oriented,” another business cliché that Reid has seen trip up, or stall out, middle managers’ careers. “It’s a matter of degree,” he says. “Obviously you have to deliver results. But if you’re too obsessed with what’s happening in the short term, you tend to overlook the longer game and pass up opportunities to broaden your skills.”

This is a particular hazard for people who are inclined to work very hard on a narrow area of expertise, Reid notes: “Ultimately you’ll be evaluated, and promoted or not, on the basis of how many different skills you have, and whether you can see the big picture. If you go too deep in the weeds on any one thing, higher-ups won’t be able to see you as a leader.”

One more notion Reid says is often fatal to the advancement of the diligent and hardworking: “Accountability.” In many companies now, he notes, this word has become “an excuse for managers to be harsh and demanding with coworkers, including peers who don’t even work for them, and now don’t want to collaborate with them, either.”

What’s far more likely to lead to a promotion, he says, is “helping other people succeed. If you hold people accountable by mentoring them and coaching them, you come across as a leader, not a taskmaster.” It’s another lesson Reid says he learned the hard way. “Early in my career I made the same mistake many young managers make, which is feeling that, in order to be taken seriously, I had to be tough and aggressive,” he recalls. “But that doesn’t work. In fact, it creates the exact wrong image.”

Of course, every company and every manager is different, so it’s impossible to say whether any of the notions Reid debunks explain why you keep getting passed over for bigger jobs. But, since you’re “steamed” about it, why not try what Reid did and take a closer look at the people who are getting those promotions? They might be doing (or not doing) something that would work for you as well.

Talkback: What business clichés have you noticed are least relevant to people’s real-world career prospects where you work? Leave a comment below.